Distributing Risks and Responsibilities

Coordinated responses to flooding in the New Orleans area date back to at least the early 18 century when the Company of the Indies built a mile long bulwark on a natural levee. Since that early project, corporations, NGOs, and local, state, and federal governments have taken numerous steps to limit the risk of flooding including building extensive levee systems, redirecting rivers, and developing evacuation plans. Like many risks that have been perceived and dealt with for centuries – including crime, disease, and other natural disasters – modern science, engineering, and institutions have worked in concert with one another to address the problem through the development of large socio-technical systems. As with most large socio-technical systems, there was no single group or organization charged with overseeing all facets of the system to limit the risks of flooding in New Orleans. While some parts of the strategy to address the risks were meticulously planned, tightly coupled, and carefully coordinated, other components and institutions were only loosely connected. There was a general sense of who was responsible for what and even a few systems set up to assess whether the specific tasks were being adequately carried out. But the very nature of enormous and complex socio-technical systems is that they are too big to be centrally coordinated in any specific manner. The components of these systems are often developed for a myriad of reasons and their role in any particular mitigation system or strategy may be quite ancillary to their primary purpose. Thus the methods by which responsibilities were distributed amongst the various components were negotiated in an unsystematic and often unspoken way. Despite the fact that the mitigation efforts were not meticulously coordinated, there was certainly some general agreement over what the overall strategy for New Orleans looked like. By tracing the ways in which tasks were distributed around it one can begin to see the ways in which ideas of responsibility hold together complex systems and perhaps why these systems sometimes fail in their mission.